Second Battle of Kharkov

Part of the Eastern Front of World War II

The Eastern Front at the time of the Second Battle of Kharkov, the operation is the small orange area with two arrows in the area of Ukraine.

Date	12–28 May 1942 (16 days)
Location	Izium/Barvenkovo area, Kharkov Oblast, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union
Result	Axis victory

Belligerents

Germany

Italy

Romania

Soviet Union

Commanders and leaders

Strength

350,000 men
1,000 tanks
~700 aircraft

765,300 men
1,176 tanks
300 self-propelled cannons.
926 aircraft

Casualties and losses

~20,000 overall
49 aircraft
12 airmen killed
98 airmen missing

277,190 overall
170,958 killed, missing or captured
106,232 wounded
2,086 guns
1,250 tanks
542 aircraft

The Second Battle of Kharkov was an Axis counter-offensive in the region around Kharkov (now Kharkiv) against the Red Army Izium bridgehead offensive conducted 12–28 May 1942, on the Eastern Front during World War II. Its objective was to eliminate the Izium bridgehead over Seversky Donets or the "Barvenkovo bulge" (Russian: Барвенковский выступ) which was one of the Soviet offensive's staging areas. After a winter counter-offensive that drove German troops away from Moscow and also depleted the Red Army's reserves, the Kharkov offensive was a new Soviet attempt to expand upon their strategic initiative, although it failed to secure a significant element of surprise.

On 12 May 1942, Soviet forces under the command of Marshal Semyon Timoshenko launched an offensive against the German 6th Army from a salient established during the winter counter-offensive. After initial promising signs, the offensive was stopped by German counterattacks. Critical errors by several staff officers and by Joseph Stalin, who failed to accurately estimate the 6th Army's potential and overestimated their own newly trained forces, led to a German pincer attack which cut off advancing Soviet troops from the rest of the front. The operation caused almost 300,000 Soviet casualties compared to just 20,000 for the Germans and their allies.

By late February 1942, the Soviet winter counter-offensive, had pushed German forces from Moscow on a broad front and then ended in mutual exhaustion. Stalin was convinced that the Germans were finished and would collapse by the spring or summer 1942, as he said in his speech of 7 November 1941. Stalin decided to exploit this perceived weakness on the Eastern Front by launching a new offensive in the spring. Stalin's decision faced objections from his advisors, including the Chief of the Red Army General Staff, General Boris Shaposhnikov, and generals Aleksandr Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov, who argued for a more defensive strategy. Vasilevsky wrote "Yes, we were hoping for [German reserves to run out], but the reality was more harsh than that". According to Zhukov, Stalin did believe that the Germans were able to carry out operations simultaneously along two strategic axes, he was sure that the opening of spring offensives along the entire front would destabilize the German Army, before it had a chance to initiate what could be a mortal offensive blow on Moscow. Despite the caution urged by his generals, Stalin decided to try to keep the German forces off-balance through "local offensives".

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Wikipedia